Inspired by dval’s diary entry, I thought I should finally summarize me experience with track recording.

I use two setups on three physical devices to record my GPS tracks - my smarthphone and two old smartphones (identical models) that I’ve dedicated to GPS recording (taken out SIM cards, stripped the software down to bare essentials). My (newer, day-to-day use) smartphone is running the latest version of the Mendhak GPS Logger app, while the two older ones are running the most recent version of the same app that still supports Android 2.3.6 (i.e. a pretty old one). I have found that these two setups produce GPX tracks with different DOP values. The newer smartphone running the newer app usually produces tracks with DOP of around 0.4-5, the older smartphones with the older version of the app are a bit higher (DOP ~1.2-8). However, it doesn’t seem to depend entirely on the smartphone model because when I was still using the OsmAnd app for GPS tracking on the newer smartphone, the DOP values were a lot higher (~4-15 or thereabouts).

Every time I return from a trip or a hike, I download the GPX tracks from all three smartphones and in all of them I throw away all points with a negative elevation (<ele> tag) to get rid of complete rubbish. Then, for the newer smartphone, I throw away all poins with HDOP higher than 0.7 and for the older smartphones higher than 1.5. When I say “throw away”, I mean that I replace the track points in question (<trkpt> tag) with “</trkseg><trkseg>” so I don’t just connect the adjacent points. This way, I get a GPS track full of “holes” but since I’m recording three tracks at the same time and I often record the same trip on multiple occasions, I have a pretty decent coverage of the whole trip, as well as pretty good accuracy, I dare say.

Now, what do I do with this? I have 360 files so far and JOSM is starting to notice when I display them all at once. Of course, I’m thinking about uploading them to OSM because that way:
- other people could use them
- I would be able to only load the portions of tracks for a particular area, rather than needing to display them all in full in JOSM

However:
- I don’t keep track of where I recorded a particular file and I certainly don’t feel like tagging them all for location etc. - the maintenance is tedious enough as it is.
- Many of them are next to useless on their own because they’re just a sparsely dispersed points or short dashes - it’s only after you combine more of them together that you see something meaningful.
- I don’t want to lose the HDOP information - the OSM server strips that, doesn’t it?
- I don’t want them to get lost in the vast number of other uploaded tracks, many of them low quality.

Basically, I’m looking for some place whence I could load them into JOSM along with tracks recorded by other people and then filter the lot by HDOP.

Any ideas?